VOQA:Alert! / Compliance Monitoring

The existing OTMR can provide valuable evidence but the driver manager needs a smart way to use the recorded data

Do you use OTMR data for Compliance Monitoring?

It is recognised good practice to carry out periodic reassessment of driver compliance, a safety-critical element of train operations.

For example, RSSB advocate the use of a ‘template’ of the ‘optimum driving profile’ in order to evaluate the performance of an individual driver.

We know the existing OTMR can provide valuable evidence for use in this way, having the advantage that it does not affect the driver during a journey (as might the presence of an assessor riding in the cab). But for the wide variety of operating conditions that must be covered, the many driver actions to be studied, and since the assessment will continually need to change to reflect the circumstances and the issues in question, the driver manager needs a smart way to make use of the data. The ordinary OTMR replay software is just too clumsy and inflexible.

How can the VOQA toolkit improve Compliance Monitoring?

As part of Avenca’s VOQA toolkit we have introduced a system which the end user can easily tailor as required, without needing software or IT skills.
Now, the Compliance Manager can use VOQA:Alert! automatically to search through any number of OTMR files (from one, to perhaps several hundred) and confirm that there is no evidence of an undesirable driving style, and that the driver displays a healthy form of ‘defensive driving’ – for example, reducing speed to a specified limit, or coming to a standstill, within a defined distance before a red signal.

This form of monitoring is a vital safety check on the human-in-the-loop, to be used alongside other VOQA tools for planning and performance improvement.

VOQA Toolkit Features:

Automated analysis of data

User-defined “rules”

Results database for report generation

Fleet-wide trending

Comparison of Actual Speed with Limits

Benefits of the Approach:

Easy, repeatable, auditable, quantitative driver standards monitoring

Easy to extend, as/when required

No need for additional (expensive) on-train hardware

OTMR data is already being recorded, and VOQA is available now, so why not combine the two and gain benefits?